As the fallout from the very real Sandy Hook school shootings played out at the US Capitol this week, TV's most famous fictional school dealt with the same issue.

McKinley High, the school that provides the backdrop for the teen song-and-dance show Glee, was thrown into chaos in Thursday night's episode when a gunshot was heard ringing through the building.

The show's usual boisterousness was turned on its head as for 10 long minutes as the students and teachers hid, sobbed, texted, tweeted and hugged each other while they tried to work out what was happening.

I watched the episode with my 15-year-old daughter, and to say that it was a shocking experience is an understatement. One moment, students and staff were going about their normal Glee day, worrying about a fake meteor headed to earth to obliterate them, confessing overwrought feelings to the wrong people, singing and rehearsing for regionals. Then, their world was turned upside down. It was heavy television, and particularly heavy for Glee.

But in Gleeland, the producers never fail to be execute their ideas in a stodgy mix of hyperbole and sanctimoniousness. Thursday night's episode was a case in point. There was no blood, no one was hurt – in fact, there was no real perpetrator. Sue Sylvester took the rap, "ironically" echoing the NRA's call to put armed guards in schools, saying she carried a gun to school to make her feel safe and that there were too many crazies out there with no mental health safety net in place to catch them.

It was Sylvester's gun (Uma Thurman, as she called it) that went off – accidentally, she claimed. No harm, no foul. But McKinley High has a zero tolerance on guns, so Sue Sylvester had to leave the school for Broadway where, coincidentally, Jane Lynch starts a run as Ms Hannigan in Annie on 16 May.

Glee often trips over itself in its endless attempts to be kind to the underdog, and Thursday night's plot contained the most egregious example to date. Sylvester's cover-up meant that the real perpetrator, Becky, a character with Down's syndrome, remained at large and a danger to her community. Becky is not a bad kid, but she brought in a gun from her father's stash to make herself feel safe, couldn't control it and it went off accidentally.

Predictably, here has already been an emotional reaction to the episode, with the parents of Newtown speaking out that it aired too soon to their tragedy. They are trying to heal, and they say episodes like this interfere with that process.

My daughter felt that timing was less an issue than the the subject matter. She thought turning school shootings into entertainment was disrespectful to real victims.

My criticism is not about the timing or the subject matter – it's about the way Glee handled them. How could those 10 minutes in the middle of the show have ended so cleanly? How can a shooting lead to an upbeat ending? When guns go off in schools, life doesn't go on as normal.